


The Mouth of the River Remembers the Rock

by Suaine



Category: Altered Carbon (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-24
Updated: 2019-12-24
Packaged: 2021-02-25 22:55:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,236
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21943240
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Suaine/pseuds/Suaine
Summary: After losing his sister, Takeshi Kovacs takes some time for himself.
Comments: 19
Kudos: 37
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	The Mouth of the River Remembers the Rock

**Author's Note:**

  * For [MGVR](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MGVR/gifts).



Takeshi spends the next few months after losing his sister - finally and for real - sleeve-hopping in the seediest places he can find. He’s not above admitting that it’s half self-flagellation and half an attempt to find some kind of answer to his most burning question:

What makes a person? How much influence does a sleeve have on the mind?

He thinks Poe probably got close to an answer, but Poe is dead, and he was a house.

One of his favorite sleeves is a young woman, an anarchist who blew up the wrong Meth’s private property - in this day and age, property is worth far, far more than flesh and bone. Meat is cheap but Bentley’s are rare treasures. She almost died in the incident and got sentenced to five centuries in cold storage.

Takeshi likes her. He’s making it a point to learn about all of them, to make sure that he knows what he’s risking. The bodies ache with unremembered trauma and he can feel some of it keenly. Maybe the parts that overlap with his own. Maybe that’s what makes them so cheap.

He spends massive amounts of other people’s ill-gained money to get them released from bondage after he’s done. But while he’s got them, he can use his time however he sees fit. Certainly, that’s not actually violence done to them. They won’t know, after.

In Berlin, he takes her to a shitty club and goes down on a bouncer. The hand gripping his - her - hair feels like a benediction. The salty aftertaste on her tongue is the communion wafer. Takeshi makes his own religion and gets fucked in an alley by an eager pup of a boy, a young dancer that smells like bad alcohol and worse cigarettes.

Takeshi misses his scars.

Not necessarily the physicality of them, the way they twinged when his skin got pulled the wrong way, but certainly the memory that came with them. His body had its own map to Takeshi’s life and it’s long gone. So very long gone.

He has a mission now, something to work toward, but he can’t start until he’s figured something out. When he faced his sister on the Cloud, he wanted to die. Really, properly die. It might be some kind of psychotic break from three-hundred years of unreality. He’s software now, a pilot in a meat suit. It might just be that his sorrow had finally caught up with him.

He buys a sleeve so old he’s half afraid he’s going to die from natural causes. The frail old man has spent 92 years on this planet, hell, this city, and all he had in the end was bankruptcy from medical debt for his, ultimately useless, quest to save his wife. The wife died and the husband sold his body to afford the funeral. It’s the saddest, most pathetically common story he’s ever heard.

He takes the body to the grave of the body’s wife and sits there for several hours. He can feel the strain it puts on old, old muscles, sinew and bone. He’s not sure the man can get up again, but someone walks past as he tries to heave himself to standing. A teenager, gender somewhat indeterminable. Maybe the Adam’s apple means they’re a boy, or maybe that’s just some goddamn variation. He thanks them.

“Sure, grandpa,” the kid says, and Takeshi stops thinking about what they are.

Does it matter? Gender is a construct and so is the body - the mind is the only thing that matters. His body burns with pain as he shuffles back to his hideout. If he dies in this body, he’s going to have to pay damages. The contract is clear enough and he’s not about to stiff a dude out of a well-made synthetic. Technically, anyone can live forever, within a very narrow range of definitions: anyone, but mostly the rich, live, but maybe not in true human flesh, forever, unless the violence so common in this world finds them first.

It’s easier to kill, now. Violence is so deeply ingrained in the human psyche that Takeshi has never been surprised by its extent, but he’s surprised now by the volume. Not all, maybe not even most, of the violence is criminal. There’s so much grey, so much self-inflicted and accidental death. They were supposed to make a paradise and only the Envoys seemed to doubt that this could work. Stacks can’t heal a broken system.

They’ve done nothing but turn the human experience into a video game.

Kovacs was a killer. Takeshi wonders if he can be something else. Maybe.

The youngest sleeve he takes is highly illegal. The documentation says 18 but that’s a goddamn lie. He uses the boy anyway, because he wants this burning rage in the pit of his stomach to be quenched by blood. Some of his sleeves are prostitutes, or whatever the word is for selling your body for sex when you’re not in it. The blood of the men runs free and copiously.

He only dies two times. The first is a soldier down on his luck. It’s his own history that haunts him, not Kovacs’, but that doesn’t make him any less dead- Or sleeve-dead, anyway. Takeshi’s got a backup stashed every time he takes a new body and instructions on how to get the next sleeve on the list, so he spends his time with that one finding out what happened to the soldier.

He has a list.

It’s a set of names of people who filed requests to be re-sleeved into their own bodies even after massive trauma, crime or a dangerous history. Takeshi wants to understand what it is that makes them so attached.

It’s all just meat and meat is cheap.

Maybe it’s what comes with being an Envoy, this weird feeling like he’s never at home in his skin, or anyone else’s either. He wants to know what how it feels to have a body and consider it the self. It’s not been like this for him, not since returning from storage, and maybe not even before, though he doesn’t remember all of that life. Stacks aren’t perfect databases. They’re really just a hard copy of an imperfect human mind.

Does the process run differently on different hard ware? Does he remember himself differently when he’s a young woman, a tall guy, someone who is allergic to shellfish?

The violence isn’t violence when they don’t remember. Right.

Right?

Takeshi works down the list as penance, freeing each of them spiritually, and then physically, and sends them off to somewhere they can be people. He has no idea what his princess would say, because this is all stack-heavy work. It’s a hobby. It lets him connect.

Hilariously, ha ha, he finds himself in the wreckage of other lives. The bodies tell him their stories and as he listens, he finds his own voice. Takeshi. Takeshi Kovacs. A boy at home in the in-between space of what a human being really is.

He may never truly understand this thing that’s growing inside him, this knowledge and certainty, this reliving and meticulous undoing of trauma carved into marrow and bone. It doesn’t matter. He can find his princess and on the way there, find himself, too. He’s not the same person from one body to the next, but he’s always himself.

Takeshi. His mother’s son.


End file.
